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Posterous Is Now 'Spaces,' A Photo-Focused App For Private Sharing

Start-up Posterous, best known for its simple blogging service via email, has revamped the company around a new product called Posterous Spaces.

Posterous Spaces is designed to help people easily privately share photos and videos with friends or family. It’s available for use as an iPhone app, on the Posterous website, or via email. The move makes Posterous less in competition with blogging platforms such as Tumblr and more of a private photo sharing service along the lines of Path.

People can create individual Spaces for each of their social groups, such as family, rooommates or friends, or for special events such as weddings or parties. The groups can be public or private, but will likely be attractive to people who want to create their own private photo sharing groups. The service is designed to be simple to use, with clear designations of what is private and what is public, says Sachin Agarwal, founder and CEO of Posterous.The new Posterous mobile app–which is the focus of the new service–has a Facebook-style stream of content from the various Spaces that the user is following. It includes the standard “Like” and comment features. When posting photos from the app, which Agarwal believes will become a major use of the app, people can quickly geotag a photo, snap a photo from the iPhone or select an existing photo from iPhone albums without even leaving the app. People can also still use Posterous as it has been used–to share text or photos to multiple services such as Facebook, Twitter or Flickr.

The Y Combinator-backed company is still keeping the ability to use Posterous as a public blogging platform. But the Spaces product seems to place Posterous more in the realm of private photo sharing app Path, founded by former Facebook executive Dave Morin. “Blogging is definitely one use case for Posterous,” Agarwal says. “We’ve found that the overwhelming amount of what people want to share is photos and video, especially from the iPhone… That absolutely is where we see sharing going in the future. But we don’t define it as a photo app, because you can use it for long form text documents.”

The feature that will make Posterous Spaces easy to connect with non-technical friends or family members is email. When a Posterous user shares photos with family members who are not registered on Posterous, those family members will still receive the photos via email. In addition, those family members can email in photos to the service to add to that Posterous Spaces group, even if they’re not members. This will make it easy to onboard people. “The way it’s designed is we think about the ‘Mom use case’ as a normal user,” Agarwal says. Unlike photo apps such as the popular Instagram app, with Posterous you can post multiple photos in one post, and you can create private groups.

The organization of the service around following groups instead of people is designed to provide more control than other services such as Facebook. As for any similarity with Path, Agarwal didn’t want to talk about other competitors directly, but says Posterous is trying to differentiate by making it as simple as possible and not “inventing problems.” “We’ve found it exciting that a lot of companies in the past year have been trying to solve the problem of how can people share more safely and privately,” Agarwal says. “We’re trying to figure out solutions that are simple and mapped to real life. Some others try to invent new problems, with solutions that are difficult to understand and explain for normal users. That’s why we created the simplest model possible.”

The market for photo apps is crowded, with services from Instagram to Google to Facebook. Posterous will try to carve out a space for people who do not want to share on Facebook and would prefer a more simple private option.

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Sachin Agarwal will be giving a talk on September 23rd at 12 noon about why they decided to overhaul, redesign, and rebrand the entire Posterous experience. A few spots are still open. Info & RSVP: http://www.zurb.com/soapbox/rsvp

Apps are really popular today. apps market keeps growing. i am not a developer, but decided to investigate how can a simple person make an app. i found a web service called snappii. appears to be one among few that helps people make apps without any programming skills.